10/03/09

This afternoon I went snorkeling with Kyle again. The tide was out and therefore the water was about three feet lower so I could touch the bottom. We hadn't started swimming too long and a few kids swam out to see what we were doing. It seems that whenever you go somewhere, there are always a bunch of Haitians who will tend to gather around. Well, as I said, we hadn't been out long and this boy was swimming next to us. He dove down and came back up. As soon as he surfaced, he was spitting sand out of his mouth. I didn't know what had happened. It was the craziest thing. I couldn't make any sense of it so I just sort of dismissed it. Well, we kept snorkeling and looking around. About twenty minutes later we started swimming along the coast to look for some coral. As we were making our way along I slowed down to look at the bottom of the ocean. We were finding some star fish and I noticed a sand dollar, so I stopped and just floated there for a second. I guess the boy caught up with us because I noticed him to my left. I saw him dive down and noticed that he was going head first toward the sand. He kept going down and just as his head reached the bottom I could tell he was opening his mouth to get a full scoop of sand. It was horrendous. I cannot explain it at all. I guess it was just a kid trying to have some sort of fun not realizing how horribly disgusting it was. Kids do some crazy things.

There had been another boy swimming with goggles and a makeshift snorkel. His was made out of what appeared to be PVC pipe. I couldn't tell, it may have been a regular snorkel, but didn't appear so. He was swimming around with a metal spear and a large rubber belt most likely scrapped from some broken machine. He would pull the spear back with the resistance of the rubber belt (more like a big rubber band) and made a makeshift spear-gun. I had seen him out there last Saturday and he had caught/speared several fish. I guess he has gotten pretty good at it.